Foldit on the Web!
Introducing Foldit Education Mode v2 on the Web
In 2020, as the pandemic set in and classes moved online, the Foldit team realized they had a tremendous opportunity to help the science education community that was desperate for good science learning tools. They therefore created and released Foldit Education Mode in August 2020 as a ready-made teaching tool for biochemistry that instructors could use easily and freely in their courses. In the past five years, at least hundreds of educators and many thousands of students have used Foldit Education Mode.
While Foldit Education Mode was greatly successful at meeting the challenge of the moment, it still had flaws that would hold some students back from using it. The Foldit team also recently published a quantitative assessment of learning with Foldit Education Mode (https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.21906), and while it was fulfilling its purpose, there was definitely also room to improve.
That’s why they're very excited to introduce their second release of Foldit Education Mode with improved levels and teaching tools, but even more excitingly: now available on the web! This means no more downloads required, and compatibility with any computer type. For many, this will enable use of Foldit in the classroom that was never previously possible, and for many more a great degree of increased flexibility and improved user experience.
To play Foldit Education Mode on the web, please go to https://play.fold.it/, and you can start playing immediately! You’ll notice several updates to the user interface along with the new and improved puzzles. The number of puzzles is slightly larger, but this change was largely made to break up levels that had too much biochemistry and gameplay content all rolled together, and by separating it out, the learning experience becomes considerably easier.
In the long term, the Foldit team plans to explore the possibility of hosting smaller Science puzzles to help bridge the gap for new players who start with the web version, but that will require more work to complete. In the meantime, they hope that educators and students worldwide will enjoy the new and improved experience, and those who couldn’t participate before will now be able to.
As always, the Foldit team would appreciate finding out who is using Foldit Education Mode, as they don’t collect that data; it really helps with procuring more funding to support these efforts. So if you do use it, please drop them a line at [email protected].
This post originated from the Foldit blog post https://fold.it/forum/blog/introducing-foldit-education-mode-v2-on-the-web
In 2020, as the pandemic set in and classes moved online, the Foldit team realized they had a tremendous opportunity to help the science education community that was desperate for good science learning tools. They therefore created and released Foldit Education Mode in August 2020 as a ready-made teaching tool for biochemistry that instructors could use easily and freely in their courses. In the past five years, at least hundreds of educators and many thousands of students have used Foldit Education Mode.
While Foldit Education Mode was greatly successful at meeting the challenge of the moment, it still had flaws that would hold some students back from using it. The Foldit team also recently published a quantitative assessment of learning with Foldit Education Mode (https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.21906), and while it was fulfilling its purpose, there was definitely also room to improve.
That’s why they're very excited to introduce their second release of Foldit Education Mode with improved levels and teaching tools, but even more excitingly: now available on the web! This means no more downloads required, and compatibility with any computer type. For many, this will enable use of Foldit in the classroom that was never previously possible, and for many more a great degree of increased flexibility and improved user experience.
To play Foldit Education Mode on the web, please go to https://play.fold.it/, and you can start playing immediately! You’ll notice several updates to the user interface along with the new and improved puzzles. The number of puzzles is slightly larger, but this change was largely made to break up levels that had too much biochemistry and gameplay content all rolled together, and by separating it out, the learning experience becomes considerably easier.
In the long term, the Foldit team plans to explore the possibility of hosting smaller Science puzzles to help bridge the gap for new players who start with the web version, but that will require more work to complete. In the meantime, they hope that educators and students worldwide will enjoy the new and improved experience, and those who couldn’t participate before will now be able to.
As always, the Foldit team would appreciate finding out who is using Foldit Education Mode, as they don’t collect that data; it really helps with procuring more funding to support these efforts. So if you do use it, please drop them a line at [email protected].
This post originated from the Foldit blog post https://fold.it/forum/blog/introducing-foldit-education-mode-v2-on-the-web
Kategórie: Novinky z projektov
World Bamboo Day Challenge
From September 18 08:00 to September 23 08:00 PrimeGrid will be running a 5 day challenge on the Compositorial project (to be started soon.)
For more information, please see this forum thread.
Kategórie: Novinky z projektov
Thanks for supporting SixTrack at LHC@Home and updates
Dear volunteers,
All members of the SixTrack team would like to thank each of you for supporting our project at LHC@Home. The last weeks saw a significant increase in work load, and your constant help did not pause even during the Christmas holidays, which is something that we really appreciate!
As you know, we are interested in simulating the dynamics of the beam in ultra-relativistic storage rings, like the LHC. As in other fields of physics, the dynamics is complex, and it can be decomposed into a linear and a non-linear part. The former allows the expected performance of the machine to be at reach, whereas the latter might dramatically affect the stability of the circulating beam. While the former can be analysed with the computing power of a laptop, the latter requires BOINC, and hence you! In fact, we perform very large scans of parameter spaces to see how non-linearities affect the motion of beam particles in different regions of the beam phase space and for different values of key machine parameters. Our main observable is the dynamic aperture (DA), i.e. the boundary between stable, i.e. bounded, and unstable, i.e., unbounded, motion of particles.
The studies mainly target the LHC and its upgrade in luminosity, the so-called HL-LHC. Thanks to this new accelerator, by ~2035, the LHC will be able to deliver to experiments x10 more data than what is foreseen in the first 10/15y of operation of LHC in a comparable time. We are in full swing in designing the upgraded machine, and the present operation of the LHC is a unique occasion to benchmark our models and simulation results. The deep knowledge of the DA of the LHC is essential to properly tune the working point of the HL-LHC.
If you have crunched simulations named "workspace1_hl13_collision_scan_*" (Frederik), then you have helped us in mapping the effects of unavoidable magnetic errors expected from the new hardware of the HL-LHC on dynamic aperture, and identify the best working point of the machine and correction strategies. Tasks named like "w2_hllhc10_sqz700_Qinj_chr20_w2*" (Yuri) focus the attention onto the magnets responsible for squeezing the beams before colliding them; due to their prominent role, these magnets, very few in number, have such a big impact on the non-linear dynamics that the knobs controlling the linear part of the machine can offer relevant remedial strategies.
Many recent tasks are aimed at relating the beam lifetime to the dynamic aperture. The beam lifetime is a measured quantity that tells us how long the beams are going to stay in the machine, based on the current rate of losses. A theoretical model relating beam lifetime and dynamic aperture was developed; a large simulation campaign has started, to benchmark the model against plenty of measurements taken with the LHC in the past three years. One set of studies, named "w16_ats2017_b2_qp_0_ats2017_b2_QP_0_IOCT_0" (Pascal), considers as main source of non-linearities the unavoidable multipolar errors of the magnets, whereas tasks named as "LHC_2015*" (Javier) take into account the parasitic encounters nearby the collision points, i.e. the so called "long-range beam-beam effects".
One of our users (Ewen) is carrying out two studies thanks to your help. In 2017 DA was directly measured for the first time in the LHC at top energy, and nonlinear magnets on either side of ATLAS and CMS experiments were used to vary the DA. He wants to see how well the simulated DA compares to these measurements. The second study seeks to look systematically at how the time dependence of DA in simulation depends on the strength of linear transverse coupling, and the way it is generated in the machine. In fact, some previous simulations and measurements at injection energy have indicated that linear coupling between the horizontal and vertical planes can have a large impact on how the dynamic aperture evolves over time.
In all this, your help is fundamental, since you let us carry out the simulations and studies we are interested in, running the tasks we submit to BOINC. Hence, the warmest "thank you" to you all!
Happy crunching to everyone, and stay tuned!
Alessio and Massimo, for the LHC SixTrack team.
All members of the SixTrack team would like to thank each of you for supporting our project at LHC@Home. The last weeks saw a significant increase in work load, and your constant help did not pause even during the Christmas holidays, which is something that we really appreciate!
As you know, we are interested in simulating the dynamics of the beam in ultra-relativistic storage rings, like the LHC. As in other fields of physics, the dynamics is complex, and it can be decomposed into a linear and a non-linear part. The former allows the expected performance of the machine to be at reach, whereas the latter might dramatically affect the stability of the circulating beam. While the former can be analysed with the computing power of a laptop, the latter requires BOINC, and hence you! In fact, we perform very large scans of parameter spaces to see how non-linearities affect the motion of beam particles in different regions of the beam phase space and for different values of key machine parameters. Our main observable is the dynamic aperture (DA), i.e. the boundary between stable, i.e. bounded, and unstable, i.e., unbounded, motion of particles.
The studies mainly target the LHC and its upgrade in luminosity, the so-called HL-LHC. Thanks to this new accelerator, by ~2035, the LHC will be able to deliver to experiments x10 more data than what is foreseen in the first 10/15y of operation of LHC in a comparable time. We are in full swing in designing the upgraded machine, and the present operation of the LHC is a unique occasion to benchmark our models and simulation results. The deep knowledge of the DA of the LHC is essential to properly tune the working point of the HL-LHC.
If you have crunched simulations named "workspace1_hl13_collision_scan_*" (Frederik), then you have helped us in mapping the effects of unavoidable magnetic errors expected from the new hardware of the HL-LHC on dynamic aperture, and identify the best working point of the machine and correction strategies. Tasks named like "w2_hllhc10_sqz700_Qinj_chr20_w2*" (Yuri) focus the attention onto the magnets responsible for squeezing the beams before colliding them; due to their prominent role, these magnets, very few in number, have such a big impact on the non-linear dynamics that the knobs controlling the linear part of the machine can offer relevant remedial strategies.
Many recent tasks are aimed at relating the beam lifetime to the dynamic aperture. The beam lifetime is a measured quantity that tells us how long the beams are going to stay in the machine, based on the current rate of losses. A theoretical model relating beam lifetime and dynamic aperture was developed; a large simulation campaign has started, to benchmark the model against plenty of measurements taken with the LHC in the past three years. One set of studies, named "w16_ats2017_b2_qp_0_ats2017_b2_QP_0_IOCT_0" (Pascal), considers as main source of non-linearities the unavoidable multipolar errors of the magnets, whereas tasks named as "LHC_2015*" (Javier) take into account the parasitic encounters nearby the collision points, i.e. the so called "long-range beam-beam effects".
One of our users (Ewen) is carrying out two studies thanks to your help. In 2017 DA was directly measured for the first time in the LHC at top energy, and nonlinear magnets on either side of ATLAS and CMS experiments were used to vary the DA. He wants to see how well the simulated DA compares to these measurements. The second study seeks to look systematically at how the time dependence of DA in simulation depends on the strength of linear transverse coupling, and the way it is generated in the machine. In fact, some previous simulations and measurements at injection energy have indicated that linear coupling between the horizontal and vertical planes can have a large impact on how the dynamic aperture evolves over time.
In all this, your help is fundamental, since you let us carry out the simulations and studies we are interested in, running the tasks we submit to BOINC. Hence, the warmest "thank you" to you all!
Happy crunching to everyone, and stay tuned!
Alessio and Massimo, for the LHC SixTrack team.
Kategórie: Novinky z projektov
LHC@home down-time due to system updates
Tomorrow Wednesday 24/1, the LHC@home servers will be unavailable for a short period while our storage backend is taken down for a system update.
Today, Tuesday 23/1, some of the Condor servers that handle CMS, LHCb and Theory tasks will be down for a while. Regarding the on-going issues with upload of files, please refer to this thread.
Thanks for your understanding and happy crunching!
Today, Tuesday 23/1, some of the Condor servers that handle CMS, LHCb and Theory tasks will be down for a while. Regarding the on-going issues with upload of files, please refer to this thread.
Thanks for your understanding and happy crunching!
Kategórie: Novinky z projektov
